In 1982 Johns-Manville, a major asbestos manufacturer, declares itself insolvent to avoid paying claims resulting from exposure to its products. A year later, Continental Airlines, one of the top ten carriers in the United States, claims a deficit when the union resists plans to cut labor costs. Later still, oil powerhouse Texaco cries broke rather than pay damages resulting from a courtroom defeat by archrival Pennzoil. Bankruptcy, once a term that sent shudders up a manager's spine, is now becoming a potent weapon in the corporate arsenal. In his timely and challenging study, Kevin Delaney explores this profound change in our legal landscape, where corporations with billions of dollars in assets use bankruptcy to achieve specific political and organizational objectives. As a consequence, bankruptcy court is rapidly becoming an arena in which crucial social issues are resolved: How and when will people dying of asbestos poisoning be compensated? Can companies unilaterally break legally negotiated labor contracts? What are the ethical and legal rules of the corporate takeover game? In probing the Chapter 11 bankruptcies of Johns-Manville, Frank Lorenzo's Continental Airlines, and Texaco, Delaney shows that more and more, an array of powerful actors--corporations, commercial creditors, auditors, bond rating agencies and investment bankers--are coming to view bankruptcy as a legitimate business strategy. In each situation, the choice of bankruptcy by these corporate giants was directly influenced by the surrounding business community. In the case of Johns-Manville, carrying appropriate insurance did not prevent its twenty insurance companies from refusing to pay claims. Thanks to shrewdplanning and cooperation from Continental's creditors, not only was the airline able to continue flying in the first week of Chapter 11, but it could also offer the lowest cross-country fare in the market. Texaco's banks nudged their client toward bankruptcy as a way to squeeze it into compliance with banking conventions it had previously bypassed. Strategic Bankruptcy uncovers the ways in which bankruptcy has become a biased political system of allocating scarce resources. Delaney's in-depth investigation of three recent bankruptcies and his searing expose of current corporate practices make this book essential reading for corporate executives, lawyers, legislators, and policymakers.

This book provides a critical examination of modern English corporate insolvency law, in particular the procedures under the Insolvency Act 1986, from both conceptual and functional points of view. It focuses throughout on identifying a rational explanation for the form that the rules and institutions of the modern law take or, where there is no such rational explanation, the history which has resulted in the present position. A central theme of the book is that the nature and fundamental purpose of insolvency proceedings themselves dictate many of the features of English insolvency proceedings. For example, collective execution on behalf of creditors necessitates definition of the insolvent estate and the provision of rules concerning provable debts and transaction avoidance. Many key features of the insolvency procedures are therefore essentially matters of practicality rather than principle, albeit practicalities applied justly and fairly. The book covers the nature and purpose of insolvency law; the procedures; the administration, supervision and regulation of insolvency proceedings; the insolvent estate and transaction avoidance; investigation and wrongdoing by directors; phoenixism and pre-packing; distribution of the insolvent estate; and, lastly, cross-border insolvency. It examines the various principles of insolvency law in the context of practice, drawing upon historical perspectives where appropriate. By explaining how the law takes the form that it does, the book promotes an understanding of the present law and institutions as a whole, and shows how this understanding might inform future developments.

The study is a result of a collaborative research project addressing "The Implementation of the New Insolvency Regulation - Improving Cooperation and Mutual Trust". The project was undertaken by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law, the University of Vienna and the University of Milan, and co-funded by the European Union as part of the Commission's Action Grants 2013 for Civil Justice. The focus of the study concerns specific issues of cross-border insolvencies under the recast of the Insolvency Regulation which already has been prepared by a large part of the contributing authors in the Heidelberg-Vienna-Luxembourg Report. The study is comprised of three major topics: 1.The Regulation's extended scope of application, including pre-insolvency and hybrid proceedings, the relationship between Article 1(1) of the Regulation and its Annex A, as well as the interplay between the Insolvency Regulation and the Brussels Ibis Regulation; 2.the cooperation between main and secondary insolvency proceedings, the new instruments, such as "synthetic proceedings", destined to avoid or postpone the opening of secondary proceedings, further the cooperation between administrators and courts of different proceedings as well as protocols to enhance cooperation; 3.insolvencies of groups of companies, with a particular focus on jurisdiction, COMI-migration, "group coordination proceedings" and other instruments of coordination.

Maritime Cross-Border Insolvency is a comprehensive comparative examination of both insolvency regimes (UNCITRAL and EU) in shipping with reference to the main jurisdictions having adopted the UNCITRAL regime, i.e. USA, UK, Greece.